• SEO since 2007

• Agency & In-house

• Founded miratrix end of 2012

• SEO, Content & Mobile App Marketing

POLL

• Google launched and took control; of the search industry in 99/00

• Google noticed that something was messing with their SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages)

• We didn’t have a name yet

• It was 2 years before Google made an update

• Updates at this time were limited to refnement with the overall algorithm

• Florida did have underlying change to landscape: topic specifc PageRank Vs simple PageRank

• Other updates delivered to detect changes in onsite aspects (cloaking, stuffng etc)

• SEO’s (we’ve got a name now) didn’t flinch

• AdWords launched Oct 23rd 2000

• Believed to be The First SEO Killer – Actually Strengthened the SEO industry

– Help to quickly show the revenue beneft to ranking in search engines

• Search became the future...

• Updates pushed through the year

• The updates were additional features for the user experience

• In all failed to impact the quality of results

• Google wasn't winning

• Overall SERP quality was OK little effort was placed into combatting link graph spam

• Spam outing started

– Occasional validation of sites being penalized e.g. BMW

• Lots of links

– Internal link spam effectiveness was high

– Link volume as effective as domain diversity

• Keyword cram

• Lots of pages with thin content

• Underlying technical foundation

• 'Vincent' update favored big brands to independents

• This didn't do much to impact SEO's tactics

• SERPs adjustment to include new pieces of information

• 'Mayday' impacted long-tailed terms

• Sites with thin content took a beating

• Link equity still lead to dominance with SE focused content– User content not important

• A sign of things to come

• Up to this point SEO's tac-tics were

• More links

• More content - Auto generated (spun) content was at it's peak

POLL

• Panda targeted sites with thin content and high ads to content ratios

• Huge changes in the SERP’s

• Websites wiped from the listings

• Penguin, with more panda

• Penguin targeted

–Over optimized anchor texts

– Low quality links

POLL

• Smart SEO's shifted tac-tics

• Focus on user experience

• Remove thin content

• Introduce quality content

• Decrease page load times

• Reduce server errors

• Links

– Toxic links removed

– Tighter quality control on link acquisition

– Shift to a ‘natural outreach’ based on quality content (inbound marketing)

– Caution:

• 95% of content marketing to gather links does not lead to positional improvements

POLL

• Introduce social signals

– still minimal but as Google pushes on with Google+ this will grow and grow

– diffculties in analyzing other social networks continues (falls out with Twitter - crashing it if they don't use APi and FB/Google enmity continues)

• Interflora hit with manual penalty removed from listings for 11days

• Focusing on paid advertorials from Johnston press

• Warning to others before the next update

• Another Penguin update targeting certain types of advertorials and paid articles

• Panda continues to roll out in the background

• Google attempts to put the nail in SEO's coffn

– Removing natural keyword data from analytics packages

– Citing user security (due to PRISM) as the reason

• SEO's didn't have analytics in the beginning

– Quality SEO's don't need keyword data to acquire qualifed traffc

• Google will continue to develop it's understanding of social signals

• Quality of links will become more important

• Authorship and content origin will become a factor

• Google will begin to identify churn content better

• Original content will become increasingly important and diffcult to achieve

Nick Duddy

nick@miratrix.co.uk

@nickduddy

linkedin.com/in/nickduddy